Into focus

Big Eyes tells of artist’s battle to reclaim her wildly popular paintings in the ’60s

Hack painter Walter Keane (Christoph Waltz) is championed by columnist Dick Nolan (Danny Huston) in Tim Burton’s Big Eyes.
Hack painter Walter Keane (Christoph Waltz) is championed by columnist Dick Nolan (Danny Huston) in Tim Burton’s Big Eyes.

Big Eyes is not one of Tim Burton’s curious fantasies like The Nightmare Before Christmas or James and the Giant Peach. It’s a drama distilled from the real-life relationship between Walter Keane and his wife, Margaret, that started in an era when women were beginning to rear up against what they perceived as male dominance at home and in the workplace.

That’s what Margaret does. And even the most imaginative fantasy writer would be hardpressed to come up with a more bizarre story.

Big Eyes

Grade: 90

Cast: Amy Adams, Christoph Waltz, Danny Huston, Jason Schwartzman, Terence Stamp

Director: Tim Burton

Rating: PG-13 for thematic elements, brief strong language

Running time: 105 minutes

When the two meet in the 1950s, Margaret (Amy Adams) has had single motherhood thrust upon her, minus child support. After moving from the suburbs to San Francisco’s increasingly hip North Beach, artistically inclined Margaret lands a job painting pretty designs on furniture in a little factory and selling her garishly sentimental paintings of big-eyed waifs at weekend art fairs around the city for $1 apiece. That’s where she meets Walter (Christoph Waltz), who presents himself as a sophisticated French-trained painter of Parisian street scenes while swveeping naive Margaret off her feet.

Before you know it, they’re living in matrimonial bliss in an attractive apartment with Margaret’s young daughter, Jane (Delaney Raye), where Walter supports them in comfort thanks to his successful real estate career (although, he insists, he has the soul of an artist). As Margaret’s canvas urchins grow in popularity, he is cheerfully, relentlessly supportive, especially when her “lost children” outsell his depictions of Montmartre avenues.

That support extends into dicey territory with Walter’s claims that he is the creator of Margaret’s paintings. He does so, he says to his bewildered bride, so as not to confuse those who mistake him for the artist as he aggressively markets Margaret’s work — which she conveniently signs with her last name, thus enabling the deception.

Margaret, appalling in her docility, is easy to manipulate. She goes along with this soul-stomping anonymity for a while, watching as her creations become a cultural phenomenon. Then she doesn’t. That’s when Big Eyes snaps out of its deteriorating dreamy domesticity into a sharply focused firecracker of a standoff between Walter and his suddenly empowered, well-armed and very vindictive opposition.

Adams couldn’t be better in the coveted role of Margaret — who wouldn’t want to transform from simpering milksop to magnificent warrior woman in less than two hours? Waltz very nearly matches her with a crafty performance that humanizes Walter while not denying his talent at exploitation.

Set against the backdrop of the emerging liberated female artists and poets of the Beat Generation, Margaret’s story is summed up in the words of author Anais Nin, who once said, “I hate men who are afraid of women’s strength.”

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